Cross-linguisitic Experience on English Idiom Comprehension

"The Role of Cross-linguisitic Experience on English Idiom and Proverb Comprehension: A Case of Iranian Turkish Learners of English as a Foreign and Third Language," by Behnaz Moein, Robab Khosravi, and Hooshang Yazdani

Introduction

Bilingualism is extremely important in today's day and age with approximately two-thirds of the world's population growing up in primarily bilingual environments. In the study done by Moein et al. (2009) the primary population focused on, is Iranians'. The authors' main goal was to find out distinctions in Persian monolinguals and Persian-Turkish bilinguals performances in idiom-proverb comprehension test. The main question asked in this study was to see if there is a statistically significant difference between the performances of Persian monolinguals and Persian-Turkish bilinguals in idiom-proverb comprehension.

Bilingualism has always sparked interest in education and how beneficial it is in enhancing the quality of learning. Many previous studies have investigated exactly how beneficial it may be to know two languages. In a study done by Ben-Zeev (1977), he tested children who were monolingual and bilingual and found that bilingual children did far greater on grammatical judgment tasks. Other such studies tested similar concepts, such as Galambo's (1982) study on Salvadoran children bilingual in both English and Spanish. The research conducted found that bilingual children had stronger syntactic orientation when judging grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. However, there are studies that show bilingualism as being a disadvantage in learning. In a study done by Nayak et al (1990), the research found that bilinguals, as well as multilinguals, are not clearly any more superior than monolinguals in learning abilities. In another study, like the one researched in this paper, Bahrainy (1977) studied both monolingual and bilingual Turkish-Persian bilinguals and Persian monolinguals. The findings show that monolinguals surpassed bilinguals in both grammar tests.

This paper is taking a new perspective on a few main issues in bilingualism, mainly trying to propose a new direction for bilingual research by addressing different degrees of bilingualism in parent-child communication will result in better achievements in proverb-idiom comprehension. An interesting concept that is yet to be studied is that bilinguals may have a wider range of thought and greater command of the language. The study questions whether bilinguals and monolinguals have significant differences in idiom comprehension, proverb comprehension, and if there is any difference in sex and age (Moein, 2014).

Methods

Four tools were used to evaluate the hypothesis. They used the Nelson English language test, Yandell's Idioms Test, English Language Proverb Test and Demographic Questionnaire. The English language proficiency test was taken in order to measure the grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation of the English language that the participants had. The idiom and proverb test were both reliable and meant to examine how well participants were in the grammar of the languages tested. The demographic questionnaire was done in order to understand the participant's knowledge of the Persian and Turkish language. Once they understand the background information of the participants, they split them into four groups (Moein, 2014).

They distributed 91 subject in four different groups mixed with both males and females. The groups were split based on their English proficiency level and a demographic questionnaire. The first group was composed of Persian monolinguals, 13 females and 7 males. The second, third, and fourth group consisted of Turkish-Persian bilinguals, with the second consisting of 22 females and 3 males, the third group had 23 females and 3 males, and the final group had 9 females and 11 males. the bilingual groups differ in what language the groups use at home with their parents. In the second group, they know Turkish but speak in Persian to their parents. The third group uses both Turkish and Persian with their parents. The fourth group speaks Turkish to their parents (Moein, 2014).    

Moein, 2014

Discussion:

The authors' main goal was to find out distinctions in Persian monolinguals and Persian-Turkish bilinguals performances in idiom-proverb comprehension test. The researchers tested to see if differences in gender and age contributed to differences in the idiom-proverb comprehension. They split the participants into four different groups based on their English proficiency level, which was conducted by the Nelson English Language Test. They then conducted a proverb test, idiom test, and a demographic questionnaire to investigate participants background information, and their understanding of Persian and Turkish languages. The results support the hypothesis suggesting that being bilingual is neither a burden or aid in learning a third language. As for gender and age differences, they found that males performed better on both idiom comprehension and proverbs; while age had no significant differences.

The research did point out new information that may be important for further research questions, specifically about the proverb mean differences in bilinguals. Considering that the bilinguals were split in groups regarding their demographic background, the research shows that the bilingual's first learned language, also known as mother tongue, may show a certain level of expertise if they go far enough to learn it academically. Although this paper was interesting, there were a few shortcomings in the research. The groups in the study were not equal in number or in the way the gender was split. This was taken into consideration in the study, but it may have made a difference in the data specifically for the differences in gender. There were more females than males, and that could be a reason the numbers were higher for males doing better in the proverb and idiom tests. They had less of an average to calculate by.

This research helps us look at bilingualism from another universal aspect. Each language is different and has unique set of qualities to each language. By running different studies, in different areas of the world, we can better understand not only language, but the universal idea of whether bilingualism is truly beneficial. The research done so far, has shown that bilingualism helps students not only in aspects of education, but also by preserving languages that may soon be extinct. The more research done, the better we will understand the effects language has on not only ourselves, but of the future of our world.

References

Bahrainy, N. (2003). The impact of bilinguality on third language acquisition: A UG-based approach. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tehran.

Ben-Zeev, S. (1977). The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitivedevelopment. Child Development 48, 1009-1018.

Galambos, S. (1982). The development of metalinguistic awareness in bilingual and monolingual children. Paper presented at the Seventh Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston.

Moein, B., Khosravi, R., & Yazdani, H. (2014). The role of cross-linguistic experience on english idiom and proverb comprehension: A case of iranian turkish learners of english as a foreign and third language. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4(5), 1017-1025.

Nayak, H., Hansen, N., Krueger, N., & Mclaughlin, B. (1990). Language learning strategies in monolingual and multilingual adults. Language Learning 40.2, 221-244.